Magic Eye Music Video Hides 3D Images With Optical Illusions [Video]

Young Rival just took stereograms, or Magic Eye pictures as you may know them, to a whole new level with their latest music video “Black is Good.”

Magic Eye pictures are those flat patterns or crazy images of static that you stared at in grade school attempting to see the hidden image. The trick was to relax your eyes, which became maddeningly difficult the harder you tried.

Young Rival applied this same concept to a music video to create a random dot autostereogram. A stereogram is an image that uses a “crossed-eye” or “parallel-eye” method to create the illusion of depth perception on a static image when viewed with two eyes. By relaxing your eyes, you’re able to “look through” the static to see the hidden image.

Admittedly, this took multiple attempts to view, and even then it was difficult. By relaxing your eyes, and making the screen as large as possible, the static magically transforms in words, people, and pulsations. The subtle pattern changes combine the information gathered by both eyes into a single image, allowing you to see the unseen.

The music video was directed by Jared Raab and programmed by Tomasz Dysinki using a computer and an Xbox Kinect. The video description gives a more in-depth technical explanation:

To make your own autostereogram, one must first create a thing called a “depth map” which is a 2D representation of 3D depth information. We collected real-time depth data of Young Rival performing the song using an X-Box Kinect hooked up to a computer. The computer was running software called RGBD toolkit, designed for capturing the depth information from the Kinect using its built-in infrared system. Once we had our depth information, we unpacked it into image sequences and edited these sequences as if they were regular video.

To complete the video, they used an algorithm to convert each frame into a stereogram image. Can you see the hidden images? Check out the video below.